In My Gaslighting at work: how to recognise it and what to do
"That meeting didn't happen the way you remember." "I never said that." "Everyone else understood — why is this only a problem for you?" "You're being too sensitive." If sentences like these have become normal at your job — and you've started wondering whether you actually are misremembering things — this one's for you.
What gaslighting is (and isn't)
Gaslighting is a pattern of denying your accurate read of events until you start to distrust it. At work it looks like: commitments denied ("I never approved that deadline"), conversations rewritten ("that's not what was said"), instructions that shape-shift ("I told you the opposite"), and your reactions dismissed ("you're taking this too personally").
Honesty in both directions: people do genuinely misremember, and two colleagues can leave one meeting with two sincere versions of it. A single disputed memory isn't gaslighting. The pattern is the tell: if the "misrememberings" consistently favour one person and consistently cost you, that's not chance. And if the conduct is sexual in nature and targeted at a woman, it can also be relevant to a PoSH complaint — not just a difficult manager.
Why it works on capable people
Gaslighting works better on conscientious people. If you're the kind of person who asks "could I be wrong?" — a good quality — then someone who answers "yes, you're always wrong" with enough confidence can hijack that self-questioning and turn it against you. The dread, re-reading your own emails, apologising for things you're not sure you did: that's not weakness. It's the predictable effect of the technique.
The habit that switches it off
Gaslighting has one dependency: no record. It can't survive contact with contemporaneous documentation. So:
- Write it down the day it happens — date, time, place, what was said (word for word where you can), who else was there. On a personal device or personal email, never work systems.
- Confirm conversations in writing, politely. "Just to confirm what we agreed this morning: the deadline is the 14th and the scope is X — do let me know if I've got that wrong." One line after every meaningful verbal exchange. It reads as diligence and quietly closes the door on "that's not what we agreed."
- Keep the replies. Silence in response to a confirmation email is itself informative later.
- Tell one trusted person early — not for action, for calibration. A sane witness to your reality is the antidote to doubt.
You stop arguing about memory (unwinnable against confidence) and start relying on paper (unwinnable against evidence).
You don't have to work this out alone. In My Corner is a team of five AI companions for exactly this — one who listens, one who decodes letters and knows your deadlines, one who keeps your evidence organised, one for fresh starts, one who teaches. Private by design: conversations are never stored on our servers.
Talk it through — In My Corner